Hi Sydney,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, self-direction, and universalism.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were social, artistic / spatial, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to study hard .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Sleep earlier (before 11:00pm!) .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feel refreshed, energized .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Procrastinating work till too late, hanging out w friends late .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When i get home, I will sit at my desk and do work early .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Organizational .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Discouraged when receiving critical feedback, and Discouraged when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Grateful .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Curiosity is important, interest is an emotion |
| I thought the part about survivor mission was really interesting — sometimes it's a hard event that triggers purpose |
| Goal fusion! |
| Just positive thinking alone isn't enough— set if-then concrete action plan |
| Deliberate practice is what makes for the most improvement, and flow is the product of that hard work |
| I really liked Lauren's study about how giving advice helps the advice giver! |
| Success comes from the ability to overcome adversity but also from having support |
| Change your situation, it's not "just do it" |
| Actively reach out for mentors who are authoritative |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Madeline Kohn |
| Sydney is a scientist, artist, teacher, and friend. I am so lucky to have been in two classes with her this semester, in addition to being her team-mate in GritLab. No matter how long her day was (especially after multiple hours teaching West Philly high-schoolers about health-sciences) she always had a warm and insightful word for her team-mates. She is very open to the world, and approaches new things as a learner rather than a critic. Nevertheless, despite her many roles and experiences, she remains true to herself. After giving her all, she takes a step-back to synthesize how she can improve, or what can be changed about the situation. She is never complacent, and always kind. She is a natural giver and I was lucky to experience all that Sydney had to offer her team in GritLab.
Sydney's discovery project was very moving. She shared incredibly honestly about her experience with Penn's challenging academic environment, and in doing so invited open conversation among her peers. Not only did she synthesize a challenging experience into moving prose, she coupled it with stunning visual art-work that took hours and hours. This project was very true to her values and experiences, and like with everything else, she clearly gave it her all. |
| Jay Brown |
| Sydney, I want to thank you for being a great teammate and friend this semester. You are genuinely one of the kindest people I have met at Penn, and I feel like you do not have a bad bone in your body. I’ve also enjoyed your stories and perspectives over the semester, and I think you are heading in a good direction in life. I have confidence you will make a great impact on the world because of your kindness and perspective - never doubt yourself.
You inspired me with the art and story-telling you pursued with your Discovery Project. With your great heart and perspective, I think you can make a difference in people’s lives with your stories. I appreciated how you took on a hard topic (I personally had the struggle you talked about with college in the story). You are able to inspire hope in others even with these stories, even though the topics are difficult. I can’t wait to see what stories you write in the future.
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| Ojasvi Rana |
| Sydney is like a breath of fresh air. It is very rare to find a friend in a group project, as people tend to go their separate ways after class. To use an analogy from her discovery project, if we are wildflowers, then Sydney is the valley that we flourish in. She invites people in with warmth, offers genuine connection and shows nothing but kindness, generosity to nurture a blossoming friendship. I am very grateful to have gotten to know her in and out of class as a good friend, and I hope to one day soon show Sydney Liu, Sydney, Australia.
Over dinners, we have had conversations about the themes Sydney discussed in her discovery project; about the competitiveness and toxic exclusivity culture at Penn, trying to find belonging and your identity amongst all the pressures. What struck me is Sydney’s eloquence in expressing difficult and sometimes intangible topics. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and that willingness to show vulnerability is a strength that is on display in her short graphic novel. I was moved to tears, and that work left an impression in my mind - I still think about it randomly during my day. I think that’s the sign of a true artist and definitely a sign of a successful discovery project!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.